It is one of the abiding ironies of art and taste that the current, growing, popular fascination with “outsider art” coincides with a historic deskilling in academic artistic training, a near cult status of “authenticity” in aesthetic standards and a prevalence of OCD detail among many artists. This might all contribute, you’d think, to a blurring of the distinction between fine art and outsider art, between the art world and the untrained, the knowing and the savant. The gravedigger scene in Hamlet comes to mind. The mad prince was sent to England because “there the men are as mad as he.” And yet, exaltation of “outsider” status abounds, despite the pervasive outsiderish quality of the inside art world.

None of this detracts one iota from the sheer visual splendors and moving testimonies to the creative urge that awaited visitors last weekend at the redoubtable Outsider Art Fair. On three floors of the old Dia building were abundant examples of the “old masters” of art brut (Henry Darger, Albert Louden, James Castle, Bill Traylor, the Philadelphia Wire Man) rubbing shoulders with anonymous side show placards, self-taught originals like Morris Hirshfield, many extraordinary works by artists at every point along the autism spectrum, even an art world luminary like the eminently sane Peter Saul who simply “looks” a bit nuts. The criteria are kept loose as befits riposte to regulation.

As if to prove the slippery boundary between outsider and hipster, Louis B. James has the same artist, Bruce Davenport Jr., in their booth and at their Lower East Side premises. His exhilaratingly vertiginous and obsessively fandom-annotated fight scenes document his love of Mike Tyson. They are knock out.

Fair: 548 West 22nd Street, between 10th and 11th avenues, from 11AM to 8PM Saturday and 11AM to 6PM Sunday.

Show: through February 21 at 143b Orchard Street, between Rivington and Stanton streets, 212 533 4670

A ready-made sculpture has an essentially ambiguous, philosophically fascinating double identity: It is a work of art; it is a functional artifact, a tool. Neither Donatello nor Michelangelo could have made a ready-made; like abstract art, they are a distinctive product of modernist artistic culture, for only when there exist a plenitude of machine-made artifacts could ready-mades be created. All works of art, it might be said, have such an ambiguous identity—they are both physical things and art. Michelangelo’s David, for example is a piece of marble and a representation of Goliath’s killer. And, as Arthur Danto famously argued, Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box is both a brillo box, a utilitarian artifact and, also, a work of art. But ready-mades complexify how we understand this familiar ambiguity because their nonartistic identity is so self-evident. Duchamp’s Fountain is a urinal—and his Bottle Rack is a bottle rack. How, then, can they also be works of art?

Because ready-mades literally consist of commonplace objects, understanding why the artist selected them, when—after all—there are so many artifacts available– provokes commentary. And because our styles of toolmaking have changed drastically, the history of the ready-made provides an historical perspective on our culture. Jeff Koons’ vacuum cleaners such as New Hoover Convertibles Green, Blue, New Hoover Convertibles, Green, Blue Doubledecker (1981–87) and his basketballs, One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (1985) is a good example, consist of ready-mades plus containers vitrines for the vacuum cleaners; tanks for the basketballs. And as Larry Gagosian rightly notes, Koon’s very Duchampian public sculpture Split-Rocker (2000) “really (is) a ready-made.” More exactly, it is a planter composed of two (vastly enlarged) halves of two entirely distinct originals, two different toy rockers, a pony belonging to his son and a dinosaur (“Dino”). Normally ready-mades by Duchamp and Koons are utilitarian objects and so the same size as their source. (This is true also of Brillo Box, which is the same size as a Brillo box.) The dramatic change in scale of the ready-made sources of Split-Rocker means that we become like children faced with a gigantic toy.

Just as Duchamp’s ready-mades inspired elaborate discussion of his erotic imagination, so Koons’ assisted ready-mades provoke discussion of race, gender-politics and economic inequality. Interpreters treat his art as a referendum on our political culture. A generation ago interpretation of Duchamp preoccupied scholars. Now, such is the pressure of historicism his ready-mades require reinterpretation. Urinals similar to Fountain are still used but the bottle rack, employed in Duchamp’s day, as Calvin Tomkins has observed, by “thrifty French families” to reuse “their wine bottles”, looks exotic nowadays to most Americans.

Also discussed in this capsule review: Jeff Koons: A Retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art , June 27-October 19, 2014; Marcel Duchamp at Gagosian Gallery, New York, June 26-August 29, 2014

It was a sad day when Ohad Meromi moved out of our studio building. I used to delight in stealing a peek into this neighbor’s studio whenever I passed by because everything he had in production was fantastically thoughtful and rigorous. His work refers to stuff like Giacometti’s figures and game boards, and to Constructivism, but it’s not like the gimmicky recitations of Modernist tropes you see everywhere and people complain endlessly about. It has its own contexts and ideas, its own interest in labor and production. He’s a superb craftsman and sculptor, and he partitioned his studio from an open common area with a round, handmade wooden wall that now divides the screening room from the rest of Nathalie Karg. His video, Worker! Smoker! Actor! (the exhibition’s centerpiece), tracks a woman employed on a cigarette assembly line, which is depicted in an animation by Meromi. There are intertitles taken from Vsevolod Meyerhold’s Meyerhold on Theater (1969), exhorting the possibilities of disassembling boundaries between physical action and psychic experience, between work and leisure. It’s unclear if they’re presented skeptically or earnestly. But it’s more than worth it to stick your head in and see what Meromi can do. I wish I still could more often.

Ohad Meromi: Worker! Smoker! Actor! through August 15. 41 Great Jones Street, between Bowery and Lafayette, New York City, 212 563 7821

Everything David Lynch does is worth consuming, even the stuff he’s not known for. His memoir, Catching the Big Fish (Tarcher, 2007), is basically a brief, pleasurable tease. So, yeah, he directs, acts, writes, paints, is an animator and cartoonist; but who knew he also designs furniture? In “Abnormcore,” now at Room East, there are interesting home decor-esque sculptures and paintings by eight artists, including Lynch’s handsome Espresso Table (1988). It’s minimal, but sort of like Donald Judd had obsessed over Fire Walk With Me as he built furnishings. The table first appears manically assembled — its legs and tension cable incongruous — then dynamically right, perfect for the spooky and loving adoration of plywood and coffee. (Lynch now also has a line of organic coffees.)

A Mercedes just burst into flames, right in the interior middle. Mercedes are kind of universal, right? In movies and on the news you always see members of a junta or cartel kingpins or threatened pro-Western dignitaries or suspicious CEOs riding around in Mercedes. And then you see the blackened husks of those cars in the aftermath of civil strife. They often provide a kind of proxy for the bodies we don’t see on the news. There are, perhaps, burned Mercedes in Syria, Mexico, Iraq, Nigeria, Afghanistan, and elsewhere right now. The fire just kind of leapt up. The space around the car is totally undefined blackness and the flames spread and there’s no sound except for roaring and crackling auto combustion. There are few cuts in the video and you just see the fire engulfing the car as the camera pans back and forth. Pretty quickly it’s an inferno spewing sooty black into the night sky. The video was made in Vietnam, which, along with its neighbors, Thailand and the Philippines especially recently, has experienced more than its share of violence. The tires are burning and the paint is puckering with boils. The camera gets really close, circling the car. Have they drained the oil, the gasoline and other flammables from out the vehicle’s organs? Could it explode? Superflex is from the Netherlands, where you probably see scenes like this far less often. But if they had Mercedes in the 17th century, there would have been Dutchmen torching them. Lawrence Weschler’s essay, “Vermeer in Bosnia,” does a great job at piercing the myth of still reflection in Dutch masterpieces, reminding you that just outside his beautiful paintings Vermeer’s countrymen were conquering the world (including Vietnam) and setting it up for the kind of crises that lead to flaming luxury sedans today. The tires are gone on one side; the thing takes a contrapposto stance in the darkness, fire still chewing at the headlights and guts. It’s still burning when the credits start rolling. All this happened in about eight minutes — is it in real time? How long does it take to completely destroy a car and leave only a charred skeleton on the roadside, rebels trudging past, for civilians to ponder the horror of? NOAH DILLON

I’m suspicious of my own love for Romanticism. The unabashed expression of feeling can be kind of embarrassing. Nonetheless, the emotive power of many artists working in the late 18th and 19th centuries is unrivaled to this day and it’s pretty easy for me to get all gushy about them. Now on view at the Morgan Library, “A Dialogue with Nature: Romantic Landscapes from Britain and Germany” illuminates the ambition of those artists, though on a small scale. The show features 37 diminutive works by Caspar David Friedrich, JMW Turner, John Constable, Samuel Palmer and four of their contemporaries from Germany and the UK — they’re something of an apotheosis of virtue in representational art of that era. Constable’s 1824 Cloud Study is the most meditative and abstract work on view. Friedrich’s drawing Jakobikirche in Greifswald as a Ruin (1815) is handsome, but neither it nor any of his other works there adequately captures his aptitude for psychological or perceptual magic. Carl Friedrich Lessing’s ink and watercolor drawing, Landscape with a Cemetery and a Church (1837), is creepy and evocative, with a perfectly decrepit Romantic tree dappling moonlight cast over headstones. And Turner’s atmospheric watercolors are jewels in what is already a very impressive collection. Although I may be conflicted about my feelings for Romanticism, I am certain that “A Dialogue with Nature” is well worth seeing. The exhibition is mounted in collaboration with Britain’s Courtauld Gallery, and a wonderful catalogue accompanies the show, featuring essays by Rachel Sloan and Matthew Hargraves.

The press release for “Kristan Kennedy Meets a Clock,” at Brooklyn’s Soloway gallery, defiantly proclaims, “All the paintings have been made, even the embarrassing ones.” T.R.N.T. (2014) is one of those on view that refers less explicitly to bodies, though all the works are rather haptic. Kennedy, a Portland-based artist, here nods to textiles and, more, to gendered divisions of labor. After staining and collaging on sheets of linen with ink, enamel, aluminum or other materials, Kennedy throws her paintings into the washing machine to age them via an aleatory gesture weighted with feminist overtones. Her mark making owes something to Expressionism, but she has rinsed Romantic melodrama from the whole endeavor, leaving exuberance and snarky fun in its wake. The resulting brushy and weathered images are hung unstretched and loose — others are draped over an austere brass armature that hugs the wall before projecting into the gallery’s space. There’s something sensuous in T.R.N.T.’s splayed diptych, conjoined at the bottom by a tenuous connection. On the left, the painting is scrawled with dense black lines like manically ruled notebook paper; on the left, curving and looping gestures in on a yellow field serve as more contemplative counterpoints. The piece droops, stretching languidly. It’s smart and erotic and not too pithy. Certainly there’s no reason to be embarrassed of it. NOAH DILLON

Are we experiencing a summer of love for ceramic sculpture? In the last couple of months there has been a critical mass of shows by sculptors that exploit, in vessel-free form, the timeless medium with zany, inventive, lusciously glazed and chromatically exuberant results on view in New York. We’ve seen exquisite essays in eccentric dexterity from Kathy Butterly at Tibor de Nagy; sumptuous, monumental biomorphs by the late Ken Price at Matthew Marks; restrained yet insouciant clay reliefs by Joyce Robins at Theodore:Art in Bushwick. Not to be missed in this rich, sweet vein, in a somewhat under the radar gem of a show at a stunning little space in Williamsburg, Ventana 244 at 244 North 6th Street on the corner of Roebling, through June 14 — is Californian ceramic sculptor Annabeth Rosen in her second New York outing since 2010. These monumentally goofy tours de force of constructional complexity and formal singularity include sculptural personae that are as defiantly present as they are elsusive or ambivalent to characterize. A garden gnome that could a scholar’s rock; a Guston painting come to life that is also an explosing of loo rolls and fruits; and in Mallo, 2013, a crackle-glazed and cracking up (what a riotous conceit) molten snowman who is revealed to have a heart of bubble-gum. DAVID COHEN

It is tempting to designate Clint Jukkala’s Telepath – one of a baker’s dozen of chirpy nursery-hued canvases in the artist’s first show with BravinLee programs – as the tripping grandchild of Matisse’s Moroccan in Green. Colors and textures are reminiscent of the master’s North African sojourn of 1912/13, while the strong purposive wobble of the giant split disks of eye and lens seem pure Matisse—with hints of Robert Delaunay and Joan Miró. It is also Matisse via Color Field abstraction, flower power iconography and Alfred Jensen, to flesh out the lineage. Gendering this progeny probably comes down to whether the fading blue verticals and sergeant-major’s stripes betwixt those dominating orbs read as facial hair or beaded veil, but the bald pate tips masculine. Equally ambivalent is whether Jukkala’s schematic yet highly individuated personages are the objects of an intoxicated gaze or themselves look out at the world (or in, at the soul) through psychedelic eyes. Matisse in Morocco, meanwhile, feels like the right blend of the canonical and the exotic for this consummate insider-outsider, the Yale MFA graduate (and instructor there before taking a chair at the Pennsylvania Academy last year) who paints his fresh, nutty, insouciantly sophisticated persona-abstractions with a constantly rewetted innocent eye.

Clint Jukkala: Cosmic Trigger through June 7. 526 West 26th Street #211, between 10th and 11th avenues, New York City, 212 462 4404

They often say of places with temperate but highly variable weather conditions, “If you don’t like the weather in [Such and Such], just wait an hour and it will change.” If only the same could be true of gray shows that linger obdurately in the art world’s calendar. The very opposite of this phenomenon is a pop-up in NoHo at a venue that is otherwise a party/event space that plays host to SUPERFOG, the 24-hour curatorial debut of Kati Gegenheimer. This is a smart, savvy, suggestive and at times scintillating grouping that one would like to savor and to recommend but it is, alas, gone like cloud. Her five-person painting show literally and metaphorically explores the meteorological in overlapping but contrastive strategies. Michael Ambron’s Occluded Stars, 2013, a cunningly ambiguous spectral smudge that reads as something between a science textbook photo and an homage to Jules Olitski, sets a vaguely conceptual tone that contrasts with the varyingly painterly, diaristic, schematic and pictorial approaches of fellow exhibitors Beverly Acha, Romina Meric, Dustin Metz and Alan Prazniak. Lovely light shines through these fast rolling clouds.